ShopBack, the leading e-commerce platform that gives cashback to shoppers, said the Philippines is among the fastest growing e-commerce market in Southeast Asia with projected doubling of transactions going through their gateway this year.
Pashant Kala, ShopBack Philippines country manager, said they have generated 9.1 million transactions/orders valued at P5.6 billion in the first half this year. This is a far cry from the 2.1 million transactions worth P1.3 billion in the first half of 2019.
“This is the highest we’ve grown in the Philippines, so we hope to raising those records,” he said.
Markets in the 8 other countries are doing fairly also, but Kala said the Philippines is among the top five markets in southeast Asia that ShopBack is concentrating, including Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia.
According to Kala, ShopBack gives an average of 6 to 10 percent cash back to customers that go through their portal, but it could be higher at times. All an online shopper do is open an account with ShopBack and they would be directed to the app such as GrabFood or Lazada that they would like to do a purchase. All these purchases would be entitled to cash rewards that account holders can transfer to their bank accounts.
“Whenever you shop online open ShopBack first, click on any of stores say GrabFood and it will take you to GrabFood app. Make a purchase, close and within seconds you see the certain percentage of cashback. So every click gives you a cashback. Even if you use coupon or vouchers you still get a cashback in actual cash from ShopBack that you can transfer to your bank,” said Kala.
In June this year alone, ShopBack has granted P10 million of cashback to customers.
“The objective of ShopBack is to provide more cash savings to shoppers online and more sales for its merchants,” said Kala. Today, ShopBack has 4-million user-base in the Philippines.
In terms of pricing, all their merchants maintain the same prices even for those purchases through ShopBack.
Before the pandemic, there were 370 merchants on board in the Philippines but 140 new merchants have been added since the start of the pandemic in mid-March this year.
ShopBack can onboard practically all kinds of industries, including the banking and real estate sector.
Soon, Kala said the ShopBack portal would be offering a new feature in its app which is to provide a comparison of prices for products to give customers easy choices.
Meantime, Kala also said that the change in buyer behavior to prefer online buying will go beyond this pandemic. “This trend is just going to go up because of convenience and ease of finding more companies online even banks,” he said.
He further said that the future of ecommerce in the Philippines is huge and could even surpass the projections by Google Temasek where e-commerce in the country is expected to surge a maximum of 27 percent to $25 billion economy by 2025.
Bullish about their performance in the country, Kala said they aim to boost their manpower to 30 from the current 25. They only started in 2015 in the Philippines.
First launched in Singapore in 2014, ShopBack has since expanded its reach to Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, Vietnam, and Korea. ShopBack partners with leading e-commerce merchants to reward its users with cashback across a wide range of categories including general merchandise, travel bookings, fashion, health and beauty, groceries, and food delivery. To date, $100 million of cashback has been awarded to ShopBack users.